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Though Al Gore has his faults, not even his most unsparing critic thinks
he might take it into his head to hijack an airplane. But that didn't stop
airport screeners from pulling him out of line as he was preparing to board
a flight from Washington to Milwaukee last week and running him through the
full "security" check: body scanned, briefcase rifled, underwear pawed
through. And it didn't stop them from doing it to him again the next day
when he flew from Milwaukee to New York.

And so the 45th vice president of the United States now has something in
common with arthritic grandmothers, diaper-wearing 2-year-olds, members of
Congress, and even the 44th vice president, Dan Quayle: All have been
subjected to pointless airport searches that had nothing to do with security
and everything to do with political correctness.

It's not a very exclusive club. I am by no means a frequent flyer, yet
I've gotten the treatment four times since Sept. 11 -- twice when I entered
the gate area, and twice when I was boarding a plane. Once I was kept
standing at the jetway door for more than 15 minutes -- long enough for
every other passenger to board -- because the screener didn't have an
electronic wand and had to wait for someone to bring one to her. I stood
there making polite small talk with her until the wand arrived and I could
be scanned. I'm sure a real terrorist, one with a weapon hidden under his
clothes, would have done the same.

"My understanding is he was randomly selected both times," Gore's aide,
Jano Cabrera, told a reporter. "And both times he was more than happy, as
all Americans are in these troubled times, to cooperate."

But the only ones who should be happy about this system are terrorists.
Every minute spent patting down Al Gore or an elderly man in a wheelchair is
a minute not spent focusing attention on a passenger who has a higher
likelihood of actually being a hijacker. A passenger named Abdullah, say,
who is 24 years old and a citizen of Saudi Arabia.

Ah, but singling out Abdullah for special attention would amount to
ethnic profiling, and ethnic profiling is banned. Transportation Secretary
Norman Mineta is adamant on the point. When he was asked on "Sixty Minutes"
some months back whether he really thought "a 70-year-old white woman from
Vero Beach, Florida," should receive the same scrutiny as "a Muslim young
man from Jersey City," he answered at once, "I would hope so."

And what Mineta hopes, his agency commands. "Do not subject persons or
their property to inspection, search, and/or detention solely because they
appear to be Arab, Middle Eastern, Asian, and/or Muslim," Transportation
Department regulations decree. "Ask yourself, 'But for this person's
perceived race, ethnic heritage, or religious orientation, would I have
subjected this individual to additional safety or security scrutiny?' " If
the answer is no, it is illegal to search him.

As an example of contemporary political sensitivity, this is hard to
improve on. As a technique for stopping hijackers, it is demented. The
Sept. 11 terrorists were not a random sample of population types. They were
all young men, they were all Arab, they were all radical Islamists, and they
were all from the Middle East. To pretend that sex, ethnicity, religion,
and national origin are irrelevant to stopping terrorists is to leave the
door open to another calamity.

Of course it is highly unlikely that any particular passenger from the
Middle East will prove to be a terrorist. But as Stuart Taylor Jr., the
respected legal journalist, points out, "if you make the plausible
assumptions that Al Qaeda terrorists are at least 100 times as likely to be
from the Middle East as to be native-born Americans, and that fewer than 5
percent of all passengers on domestic flights are Middle Eastern men, it
would follow that a randomly chosen Middle Eastern male passenger is roughly
2,000 times as likely to be an Al Qaeda terrorist as a randomly-chosen
native-born American. It is crazy to ignore such odds."

The government doesn't bar all profiling. Airlines are allowed to
flag for special scrutiny passengers who engage in certain behaviors, such
as purchasing a one-way ticket or paying for it with cash. But that is
hardly going to stop an intelligent hijacker, even one bent on a suicide
attack: He can simply buy a round-trip ticket and charge it to a credit
card. To be effective, profiling must take account of traits that are not
so easy to disguise: physical appearance, accent, place of birth.

US airports and the US government have made a massive investment in
security since Sept. 11. But the emphasis remains exactly where it was
before the attacks: on things. Is there a gun or knife in your carry-on?
Does your luggage contain an explosive? Do your shoes look odd?

But things don't hijack planes. Terrorists do. And terrorists can be
detected only by studying people. That means asking questions more probing
than "Did you pack your suitcase yourself?" It means not wasting time
frisking travelers who are clearly harmless. And it means reversing the ban
on ethnic profiling. Granted, it may make a lot of us uncomfortable to know
that some passengers are drawing special scrutiny just because they look or
sound Arab. But some discomfort is a price worth paying to prevent another
Sept. 11. Isn't it?

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